♀️AUTHOR WITH VAGINA OVERLOOKED AS PER USUAL + FEMINIST BOOK REVIEW + BON SCOTT OUR GREATEST POET?

This week International Woman's Day got me thinking how fucking criminally overlooked Ursula K LeGuin is so I'll talk about her awesome life a bit • Then we review her novel The Left Hand Of Darkness • And finally we ponder if Bon Scott might be Australia's greatest poet. Read on..

GFR NEWS | TAKE 41  

URSULA K. LeGUIN (1929 - 2018)

Most folks have heard of all venerated Sci-fi writing titans like Asimov (iRobot), Herbert (Dune), Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) and Dick (Blade Runner). And plenty of TV, Movies, articles and young male nerds keep their names regularly in the public eye. That's OK they are the agreed upon Sci-fi legends. Well the testicle clad legends anyway.

Meanwhile we never hear anything about Ursula K LeGuin from the male dominated film, publishing and media industries . Oh and she just coincidentally sports a vagina. I mean WTF kind of sexism is going on? Why the hell have we not seen multiple movies or TV series of her works by the major studios and networks? FFS they became best sellers in the 1960s!

Ursula in 1995 looking, as always, super kind and gentle and friendly and non-judgemental (photo Marian Wood Kolisch)

I personally think LeGuin should be at least as well known as the aforementioned blokes and at the very least have some of her works made into TV or Movies. I mean it does seem like Hollywood gushes over any liberal leaning issue while simultaneously ignoring so much great art by women from the feminist era like LeGuin. And this is bloody ironic considering The Left Hand Of Darkness is centred on a race of bisexual hermaphrodites visited by possibly the first leading Sci-fi character with the complexion of an African.

LeGuin is always listed in the top 10 by sci-fi reader polls and yet a great portion of the public have never heard of her or read her works or know that The Left Hand Of Darkness was a critical and commercial success, a masterpiece of the genre and the second ever to win both the Nebula and the Hugo awards back there in the summer of love 1969.

OK so lets review that masterpiece today and find out a bit of her unusual childhood in the Pacific north west of America and her multiple protests that saw her, more than any other sci-fi author, encourage us all to keep kicking against the pricks as The Man In Black liked to say.

Although LeGuin ended up in the Pacific North-West she was raised by her free-thinking parents (an anthropologist and a physiologist/writer) in California and has often noted how happy she was growing up in a house surrounded by books and progressive ideas and visits from prominent academics. Most of works are written with an anthropological influence and often contain themes of sexuality (rare in sci-fi by male authors), feminism and characters who ceaselessly fight against institutionalised conservatism and greedy, power hungry leaders and this novel, her fourth, was no exception.

Later in her life she rejected a major award as protest against legendary 'Solaris' author Stanislaw Lem being kicked out of a prominent Sci-fi authors guild after he criticised American Sci-fi writers and chose to live in the Eastern bloc in the late 70s. Her 2014 criticism of Amazon swift and brutal takeover and dismantling of publication industry was broadcast and reprinted around the world. And in 2009 she resigned from the Authors Guild after it endorsed Googles book digitisation project, LeGuin stating:

You decided to deal with the devil. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.

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FEMINIST BOOK REVIEW

The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin

Some 1970s versions of the cover artwork of LeGuin's masterpiece

OK let us detour onward to the actual book review: The Left Hand Of Darkness follows the Terran character Genly Ai who was possibly the first lead character in a internationally best-selling novel to be dark skinned (his background on Earth is never revealed). He is the initial employee assigned by the Ekumen (a group of humans representing a confederation of planets including Earth) to make diplomatic contact with the planet Gethen and offer them membership to the group.

Gethen had been provisionally named Winter because of it's year long snowfall and average temperature of below zero during summer across the entire planet and the author beautifally describes in realistic detail how the locals have learnt to live on such a hostile planet, they consider anything above ten degrees to be an unbearable heatwave and are experts and re-forrestation to ensure Hearths are constantly lit (nearly all Gethen houses and buildings have a central fireplace or hearth that is central to the lives of the people living in them). The story is entirely centred on Genly as he interacts with the distant planets residents who are human except for the fact they can be considered both male and female and can perform either of those roles during sex and can all give birth. Much skulduggery, anthropology and adventure thereafter as the primitive politics of the two warring continents on Gethen alternately try to befriend, ridicule, imprison and kill Genly.

The reader find themselves utterly transposed into Ursula's expansive, realistic, densely complex and comprehensive world and the second I start reading this book I instantly leave reality as we know it and feel like I am actually there. One of the best discoveries Genly makes is the Foretellers, a subset of Gethens who are mentally unstable and can answer any question of what will happen in the future but only once the questioner truly understands the meaninglessness of their question - a brilliant concept that has you thinking super-deep thoughts long after the chapter has ended.

Don't have to be Sci-fan to like this novel that is for damn sure. I give this novel my highest regards and note that it is, like Dune, a great novel of fiction that reveals a deeply complex society from an extraordinary imagination, happy frigging Womans Day!

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BON SCOTT OUR GREATEST POET?

I caught myself wondering today if Bon Scott is our greatest poet ever? I was listening to the ACDC track Ride On and what a fair dinkum fantastic poem that song has as it's lyrics. Ride On is a departure from most acca-dacca songs and in it Bon actually hits a very rare emotionally vulnerable note for him; while retaining his great sense of humor of course.

His brilliant lyrics on a travelling working class man's growing disillusionment with the loneliness of life as he ages and loses a step (a not to be talked about subject if your a bloke obvs). He starts off seemingly without hope:

Got another empty bottle Mmm, and another empty bed Ain't too young to admit it and I'm not too old to lie I'm just another empty head

Then he presents some possible hope that he can turn things around:

Broke another promise Now I broke another heart But I ain't too young to realize that I ain't too old to try Try to get back to the start

And ends with defiant boast that may be empty but still presents his uncompromising commitment to life on the road:

And it's another red-light nightmare Woah, and another red-light street And I ain't too old to hurry, 'cause I ain't too old to die But I sure am hard to beat

Your a fucking legend Bon, y'know life is fucked and unfair and the assholes always win when a champ like Bon never got to enjoy the massive international fame that he deserved.

Al right so I'll salute you: the 1% of people that have read this far and who actually read more than a glancing word of these things before returning to the shopping-nes-porn-sport-social-feed-zombie-dance. GFR out!